PRIVATE TEACHING | EVENTS | TALKS | WRITING
“Goddess, why don’t you change out of your female form?” asks Shariputra.
The Goddess answers, “For twelve years I’ve searched and searched, and I’ve never found ‘my female form’…. The Buddha said, ‘In all things, there is neither male nor female.’”
—The Vimalakirti Sutra
Many years ago, when I was still living at the monastery, our teachers announced that in a few months we’d hold our first all-women sesshin (our monthly silent meditation retreat). My response, which I didn’t share with anyone at the time, was to grumble, “Why do we need an all-women sesshin? Isn’t this practice about unity and non-discrimination? Why are we separating in this way?” When the day came, I walked into the dining room and found myself immersed in a sea of women—pale and ruddy faced, olive skinned or dark as earth. We had rosy cheeks and crows feet, cropped hair, no hair, hair that fell down to our shoulders in waves or framed our faces, highlighting long necks or sharp cheekbones. We had flat bellies and full bellies that held life or had borne it repeatedly. We knew each other and didn’t know each other but when we began to chant and our voices swelled, filling the room to the rafters, the earth tilted and shuddered and I understood why we were doing this.
“How’s it going?” my teacher asked the next day when I went to the building we’d reserved for the men to ask him a work question.
“The moment we were together my body let go of a tension I didn’t even know it was holding,” I said, hearing the wonder in my own voice. “I’ve never felt so safe in my life.”
And my teacher was sad. He was sad for us, for them, and for a world in which fear runs so deep, it becomes embedded in our cells. And not just fear but also insecurity, or a sense of lack, or the pressure to conform or to prove your worth.
It’s true, as the Goddess says to Shariputra, that fundamentally there is neither male nor female, neither wrong nor right, neither first or second. It’s also true that a female form—like a male form and forms that don’t fall into either binary—comes with karma and meaning reinforced over generations. The stories we tell ourselves and one another can be—and often are—heavy and binding.
That’s why, over the years, I’ve looked for and participated in spaces created by and for women. I spend a little time there and speak of what I can’t speak elsewhere, and listen, and just be, letting myself exhale and rest in a way that’s difficult to do at other times. Of course I long for a world in which these distinctions are irrelevant. But until we get there, I’d like to work to help myself and others be free within the forms we’ve been given, to see that these are more than enough, and to live from that bounty—to realize, as one of my students said, quoting another teacher, that “enough is a feast.”
More ways to connect: